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Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS)
Graduate Student Workshop

Please Note:

Registration is required for all events, unless otherwise noted. To register for an event, please go to: <click here>.

 

All events organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS) may be photographed and/or videotaped for webcast. Please note that by registering for this event, the individual grants to the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto (the “Munk School”) the right to: share your personal registration information with our event sponsors and co-organizers; and to reproduce, use, exhibit, display, broadcast, and distribute the photographed images and webcast recording, if any, taken during the event, for use in connection with the activities of the Munk School, or for promoting, publicizing, or explaining the Munk School or its activities on the Internet, including on YouTube and other video broadcast channels.

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PAST EVENTS 2013-14

October 24, 2013, 2-4 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Nayan Shah

Stranger Intimacy

Co-sponsored by the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia Pacific Studies

Please RSVP to Nicholas Feinig at: nick.feinig@mail.utoronto.ca, under the subject heading: “Shah seminar.” Space may be limited.

This is a seminar for University Faculty and Graduate Students only on Prof. Nayan Shah’s most recent book, Stranger Intimacy(UC Press, 2011). While all participants are asked to read as much of the book in advance as possible, and while the discussion will be open-ended, Prof. Shah has informed us that he would especially appreciate your attention to the “Introduction” and chapters 1, 2, and 6.

 

A Stranger Intimacy centres the experiences of South Asian migrants in collaboration with domestic and international migrants, and their struggles over social and intimate relations, in the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States and Canada. The book uniquely pairs the history of several hundred interracial marriages involving South Asian men in this period with original discovery research that documents more than a hundred cases of illicit sexual contact between South Asian men, white men, Chinese men, and Native American men. The resulting combination illuminates how the state and elites distribute protection and resources in ways that exacerbate the vulnerability of transience for most migrants, and enhance promises of settlement for only a select few. The multi-faceted significance of law, legal reasoning and rule of law governance provides both the evidence and scaffolding for the book’s arguments. Shah’s analysis of legal records of vagrancy, public indecency, seduction, sodomy, divorce, and marriage illustrates how insistently international and domestic migrants crafted alternative publics, communicated codes of honour and privilege, and defended erotic and social practices as they strategically remapped spaces and sensibilities labeled as deviant. The book’s trajectory from the local encounter to national citizenship vividly reevaluates the social, legal, and political process that drove the state’s presumption that social stability could be achieved through an invented normative family in the face of mass migration, and its non-normative sexual relations and domestic life. 

Nayan B. Shah is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California. A historian with expertise in U.S. and Canadian history, gender and sexuality studies, legal and medical history, and Asian American Studies, he is the author of two award-winning books - Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (University of California Press, 2011), and Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001). Stranger Intimacy was awarded the Norris and Carol Hundley Prize by the American Historical Association Pacific Branch for the most distinguished book on any historical subject. Shah is also co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Duke University Press), and the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, van Humboldt Foundation, and Freeman Foundation.

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Wednesday, October 30, 2013, 4-6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, Room 208N

 

Kira Lussier

Testing Temperament at Work: Human Relations, Labour Relations, and Industrial Psychology in Interwar America

 

Industrial psychologists in interwar America sought to convince corporate personnel departments that the insights of the human sciences, applied at work, would result in a more efficient, harmonious, and productive workforce. The defining methodology of these industrial psychologists was the pencil-and-paper psychological test, which they claimed could reveal a worker’s social and emotional disposition to predict behavior at work. One of the most widely-adopted tests of this kind was the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale, first published in 1935; unlike other psychological instruments, this test was specifically created with industrial use in mind. Its creators—an industrial psychologist and a personnel manager — appealed to extant corporate concerns and drew on the ideology of “human relations,” to market their test as a scientific tool that would result in more harmonious labor relations. This paper argues that the legacy of this temperament testing was to forge a connection between workers’ affective disposition and the large-scale labor relations of the workplace: in selling their test to corporate clients, psychologists claimed that the psychological maladjustment of workers was one cause of labor unrest. These assumptions came under increasing attack by cultural critics like Daniel Bell, who identified personality tests as a particularly egregious management strategy to deflect attention from the broader socioeconomic structure of American capitalism. By unpacking this debate between the creators and critics of temperament testing, this paper explores the intersection of the politics of labor, the ideology of human relations and the practice of industrial psychology in interwar America. 

 

Kira Lussier is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and a Junior Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute. With an undergraduate degree in History from McGill University, her research interests lie at the intersection of the history of the human sciences and American social history. Her dissertation traces the history of personality testing and its critics in North American workplaces from the First World War to the Cold War. She has presented her research at the International Congress for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences. 

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Friday, November 8, 9:30-11:00 am
Jackman Humanities Building
Room 718, 170 St. George Street

 

Jacqueline Goldsby

Faculty and Graduate Student Seminar

Co-sponsored by the Department of English, University of Toronto.

 

 

Jacqueline Goldsby is Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of  the prizewinning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006). From 2005-10, Goldsby directed the widely-acclaimed archival recovery project, "Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago's Hidden Archives," to support research for her next book, Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Culture of the 1940s and 1950s.

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Friday, November 15, 10:00 - 11:45 am
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Sandra Harding

Faculty and Graduate Seminar

Co-sponsored by the iSchool, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

 

For over four decades, feminists from the Global North and South have examined the tensions and contradictions in doing research that attempts to improve the conditions of women from the Global South. This has occurred in work critically focusing on, for example, colonialism and postcolonialism, modernization theory and its development projects, and international relations. This presentation will reflect on some of the major sites of such tensions and contradictions.

 

Sandra Harding is a philosopher who teaches in Education, Gender Studies, and Philosophy at the University of California Los Angeles. Harding taught for two decades at the University of Delaware before moving to UCLA in 1996. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996-2000, and co-edited the journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is the author or editor of fifteen books on issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and feminist and postcolonial theory. Her most recent books are Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (Duke 2008), and The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (Duke 2011.). Objectivity and Diversity: Feminist, Postcolonial, and Science Studies Issues will be published next year by University of Chicago Press.

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Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 4-6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, room 208N

 

 

Jacob Hogan

Who is in Charge of this Mission?: The U.S. Ambassador, CIA Chief of Station, Embassy Intrigue, and Washington

 

 

The September 12, 2012, murder of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens in Benghazi should be a catalyst for increased focus on the organizational rules and hierarchies connecting the American Mission abroad and in Washington. Hogan’s paper argues that the CIA Chief of Station, rather than the U.S. Ambassador, represents the most powerful individual in any U.S. Embassy or Consulate system. This transformation occurred in three distinct periods, all associated with the rise of the intelligence establishment, beginning with the creation of the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1882. Next, the formation of the Office of Strategic Services in World War II presented an unprecedented challenge to the State Department’s unrivaled relationship with the White House. Finally, the CIA’s creation in 1947 elevated the Director of Central Intelligence over the Secretary of State in bureaucratic importance; a new paradigm that crystallized under Allen and John Foster Dulles during the Eisenhower administration. He will place emphasis on how presidents from Truman to Nixon have personally involved themselves in determining whether the CIA or Foggy Bottom possesses the supreme authority in the U.S. Embassy structure. Hogan’s paper will mainly draw from primary documentation found in the Foreign Relations of the U.S. series.

 

Having completed his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Ottawa, Jacob is a third year PhD candidate in History at the University of Toronto, and member of the Department’s graduate journal, Past Tense. Under the working title of Beyond Beijing, Bretton Woods, and New Bancor Order: The IMF, U.S., China, and the Genesis of Global Governance, 1965-1974, his dissertation will explore the rise of a supranational currency and Chinese power, alongside the economic decline of the U.S. during the Vietnam War era. Jacob is currently researching at the Munk School for his supervisor, Ronald Pruessen, focusing on the Obama administration’s policies toward the Near East and Arab Spring. Through this work concentrated on contemporary U.S. policies vis-à-vis Libya and FRUS research for his dissertation, he has become more interested in the historical organization of the U.S. Embassy.

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Thursday, January 16, 12 noon-1:30 pm
Room 3130, Sidney Smith Hall
100 St. George St., 3rd floor

 

Cindy D. Kam

Faculty and Graduate Student Workshop

Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

 

Cindy D. Kam is Associate Chair, Director of Graduate Studies and Professor of Political Science and Psychology at Vanderbilt University.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2003. Her research focuses on political psychology, public opinion, political participation, and political methodology. In 2011, she was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award from the Elections, Voting Behavior, and Public Opinion Section of the American Political Science Association and the Erik H. Erikson Award from the International Society of Political Psychology. Kam is coauthor of Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion and Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis, and she has published articles in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Behavior, and Critical Review.

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Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 4-6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, room 208N

 

 

Hoang Vu Nguyen

Disaster, Settlement, and Belonging: Wavering Diaspora in Vietnamese New Orleans

Organized by the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop.

 

Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans (approximately 7,000 people) have been praised as a successful case of resilience among other local ethnic minorities after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. By revisiting Hurricane Katrina, Nguyen’s research shows a need to reconsider the exaggerated claims for the success of the Vietnamese. In contrast to other scholars who argued for the close-knit nature of a diasporic community (Cohen 1997; Safran 1991), he points out the fluid identity of Vietnamese immigrants that played a role in struggling for recognition. Instead of taking the Vietnamese as a homogenous minority group, his research illustrates a divergence among Vietnamese generations on local incidents upon their return to New Orleans. Five years after Katrina, the explosion of Deepwater Horizon drilling rig of British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico has hit the local economy once again. By drawing attention to race, poverty, and religion, his research has examined a negotiation process in which Vietnamese Americans wavered between a diaspora and an ethnic group. The thesis not only contributes to the current debate on the fluidity of diaspora (Clifford 1994; Dorais 2010), but it also reveals a product of white institutional power in the BP compensation agenda.

 

Hoang Vu Nguyen received a Master’s Degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2007. For his Master’s thesis, he investigated the impact of the urbanization process on residents in Hanoi, Vietnam.  Hoang works at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME), specializing in Indonesia and East Timor. He has conducted several field trips to Indonesia, Brunei, and Laos to study and collect cultural artifacts for the Opening Exhibition of the Southeast Asian Building of the VME. He is now interested in studying overseas Vietnamese and their relations with the homeland, for which he is pursuing a PhD program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

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Wednesday, February 5, 3-5 pm
Jackman Humanities building
Room 100A

 

J. Jack Halberstam

Research Seminar

Co-sponsored by the Women & Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto; and, the Department of English & Writing Studies, Western University.

 

Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at USC. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual, and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam’s first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam’s last book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity. Halberstam was also the co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano of a photo/essay book, The Drag King Book (1999), and with Ira Livingston of an anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). Halberstam regularly speaks on queer culture, gender studies and popular culture and publishes blogs at bullybloggers.com. Halberstam published a book in 2011 titled The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press), and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012). Halberstam is currently working on a project about queer anarchy tentatively titled: The Wild.

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Wednesday, February 26, 2014, 4-6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, room 208N

 

Justin Morris

Robots in Cowboy Hats: Hollywood Sound Serials, and the Hinterland Audience

Organized by the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop.

 

 

Though a great deal has been written on the status of the silent film serial as a highly popular form that helped to establish formative economic relationships between cinema and the newspaper industry, in relation to the growth of widespread fan cultures, the “golden age” of the Hollywood sound serial (encompassing a period of roughly 1935 to the late 1950s, and the advent of television) has largely mirrored the academic discussion of other “lower” film forms, such as the Hollywood B-film. Guy Barefoot indicates that film historians have only “made occasional references to […] later film serials,” quoting Ben Singer as reductively asserting that the serials survived “as a low-budget ‘B’ product with limited distribution, and an appeal primarily to hyperactive children.” Though statements such as Singer’s move to suggest that sound serials were merely poorly produced cinematic hiccups that played without fanfare to small audiences, it is the status of this unique film form among the hinterland audience which establishes its importance to economic, exhibition, and movie-going histories. Drawing upon exhibitor reports found primarily within the “What The Picture Did For Me” section of the Motion Picture Herald, this paper will seek to trace the serial’s progression from mass to niche markets, from a vastly populated “adult” audience, to a hinterland audience frequently addressed (by Hollywood and local exhibitors alike) as juvenile. Ultimately, Morris’ paper strives to establish the Hollywood sound serial as a significant—rather than diminutive—phenomena, of Great Depression-era exhibition and movie-going practice.

 

Justin J. Morris is a first year PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. Justin completed his Bachelor’s degree in History and Film Studies at the University of Alberta in 2011, and his Master’s degree in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012. His research interests include the depiction of Canada in Hollywood cinema, the phenomena of 1930s singing cowboys, and the nature of seriality in cinema. He is currently co-authoring a documentary on experimental artist Harry Smith and the Anthology of American Folk Music, to be broadcast on University of Victoria radio in the coming year.

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Friday, March 7, 10:00-11:30 am
Room 1040, Jackman Humanities Building
170 St. George Street

 

Leigh E. Schmidt

Faculty and Graduate Student Workshop

Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

 

Leigh E. Schmidt is the Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He joined the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics in 2011. From 2009 to 2011, he was the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard University, and, from 1995 to 2009, he taught at Princeton University where he was the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and served as chair of the Department of Religion. He has held research fellowships at Stanford and Princeton and also through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Schmidt earned his undergraduate degree in history and religious studies from the University of California, Riverside, in 1983 and his PhD in religion from Princeton in 1987.

 

Prof. Schmidt is the author of numerous books, including: Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2000), which won the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Historical Studies and the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association; Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (HarperOne, 2005), which appeared in an updated edition from the University of California Press in 2012; Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton University Press, 1995); and, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 1989), which received the Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. In addition, Schmidt has served as co-editor with Sally Promey of American Religious Liberalism (Indiana University Press, 2012), co-editor with Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Mark Valeri of Practicing Protestants: Histories of the Christian Life in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and co-author with Edwin Scott Gaustad of The Religious History of America (HarperOne, 2002). Schmidt’s latest book is Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (Basic Books, 2010). His next book project is on how atheism and non-belief have fared historically in American public life.

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Wednesday, March 26, 4-6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, room 208N

 

 

Mathieu Vallieres

‘...that’s malarkey, but it’s very important malarkey’: Unpacking the Nixon-Kissinger worldview and emotional community during the Vietnam War Moment, 1969-1973

Organized by the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop.

 

 

Vallières’ dissertation investigates how President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and their French counterparts Presidents Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, responded to the defeat of American power in Vietnam, and the corresponding existential realization of American limits in the world. To this end, the Paris Peace Negotiations—which intended to bring the war to a close but also prompted, at once, great power competition, collision, and collusion—becomes an ideal setting for a comparative analysis of the respective, but overlapping “imperial imaginaries” of the United States and France. The paper focuses on how Nixon and Kissinger imagined—or failed to imagine—a revision of America's role within the international order during this period of transition and transformation­—or what I call the “Vietnam War Moment.” More specifically, it aims to show that because the period was fraught with challenges unfamiliar to America's global empire, Nixon and Kissinger viewed this moment—and therefore responded to it—by relying on a set of familiar ideas made up of notions of exceptionalism, conservatism, and Cold War orthodoxies. What is more, as they grieved what seemed to be the end of the American empire (at least in Southeast Asia), they created an emotional community that privileged denial, bargaining, depression, and most importantly, applauded anger, but rarely, if ever, acceptance. Typically understood by historians as realists par excellence outside the narrative of empire (thanks in part to their own voluminous writings), the unpacking of Nixon and Kissinger’s imperial worldviews, and of their emotional community reveals that they should not only be reintegrated into the trajectory that intertwines U.S. foreign relations and imperialism, but also distanced from their purported unadulterated, rational policy-making.

 

Matthieu Vallières is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His current research is entitled The Paris Peace Negotiations 'Beyond Vietnam': Franco-American relations during America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, 1969-1973. It aims to set the American withdrawal from Vietnam within its layered historical, international, and imperial contexts while also accounting for its highly emotional character. Vallières completed his M.A. in History from the University of Toronto in 2008, and his B.A.(History) from the University of Ottawa in 2007.

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Wednesday, April 23, 4-6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, room 208N

 

Caleb Wellum

Ecology and the Politics of the Future in the 1970s

Organized by the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop.

 

 

The 1973 OPEC Oil Embargo against the United States triggered long lines at American gas stations, and signaled the end of cheap oil in the American and global economies. High crude oil prices riled American consumers and fuelled conspiracy theories, while exacerbating stagflation and the painful economic recessions of the 1970s. The potential for a more scarce energy future also ignited a heated debate about the nature and future of America’s energy system, and the potential for its disintegration. Economists and pundits feared the erosion of America’s domestic economy and political power abroad. This paper examines discourses of the energy future that used the language of ecology to predict socioeconomic catastrophe unless America abandoned the ideal of economic growth in favour of the massive social reorganization needed to support a steady state economy. Such ecological discourse relied on a politically and affectively potent politics of anticipation that demanded action now to save the future. By the end of the decade, however, neoliberal imaginaries of the energy future began to emerge that also adopted this anticipatory stance, but posited the unregulated free market as a panacea for America’s energy and economic woes. Exploring these conflicting discourses allows for a deeper understanding of the anticipatory and affective dimensions of neoliberalism, which is often reduced to a set of economic principles that cannot explain its political power on their own.

 

Caleb Wellum is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His dissertation is entitled “Energizing the Right: Economy, Ecology, and Culture in the 1970s American Energy Crisis.” His research focuses on cultural history and the politics of anticipatory discourses. In particular, his work links the history of neoliberalism to debates about energy, ecology, and economy that surrounded the energy crises of the 1970s. This work is supported in part by a CSUS Graduate Research Grant and the Gerald Ford Presidential Library. Wellum has presented at NiCHE workshops, and the American Studies Association conference. Before coming to Toronto, he earned his BA (Hon.) and MA from McMaster University in Hamilton.

 

To register for this event, please go to the Munk School of Global Affairs Events page: http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/events/

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PAST EVENTS 2012-13

Tuesday, September 11, 5-7 pm        
Rooms 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

Martin F. Manalansan IV

Graduate Student Workshop

Co-sponsored by: Women and Gender Studies Institute; Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies; Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education; Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies,
University of Toronto.

Martin F. Manalansan IV is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies and Conrad Professorial Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is an affiliate faculty in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, the Global Studies Program and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (2003), which was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize. He is editor/co-editor of two anthologies namely, Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America (2000), and Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (2002), as well as a special issue of International Migration Review on gender and migration.

 

This graduate student workshop is open to all affiliated graduate students working in American Studies, and graduate students of the co-sponsoring departments and centres. Attendance is by RSVP only. Please confirm your attendance to Stella Kyriakakis, CSUS Event Coordinator, at csus@utoronto.ca by September 7th.

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Friday, September 28, 10 am- 12 noon           
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Sarah Banet-Weiser

Faculty and Graduate Student Workshop: Academic Publishing in the Age of Multiple Platforms

Co-sponsored by Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College, University of Toronto

 

Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.  She is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (1999); Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007); and most recently, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (2012).  She is the co-editor of Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (2007), and Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (2012).  Banet-Weiser is the editor of American Quarterly, and co-edits a book series at NYU Press, Critical Cultural Communication Studies.

 

This graduate student workshop is open to all affiliated graduate students working in American Studies, and affiliated faculty members.

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Friday, October 19, 10 am – 12 noon
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place

 

Theda Skocpol

Graduate Student Seminar

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, and co-sponsored by the United States Consulate General, Toronto, and the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto.

 

Attendance is open to all graduate students and faculty members. Registration is required for this event. To attend, please email Stella Kyriakakis at: csus@utoronto.ca by October 16th.

Wednesday October 31, 2012, 4-6 pm
Room 208N

Justin Stein

Reiki in and Beyond the Japanese Diaspora: The Trans-Pacific Development of a Healing Practice, 1926-1976

Today, millions around the globe practice the spiritual healing techniques called Reiki. However, for decades after the founder’s 1926 death, these techniques were only practiced in Japan or by Nikkeijin (persons of Japanese ancestry) in the U.S. Territory of Hawaii. Furthermore, it was probably not until the 1970s that Reiki reached ten thousand practitioners, and, although similar techniques were popular in pre-war Japan, it was only after Reiki became widespread in the U.S. that it became well established in its land of origin. This paper examines the roles of social networks as well as ethnic, religious, and scientific imaginaries in Reiki’s ongoing development and circulation from its origins in 1920s Tokyo to its first non-Nikkei teachers on the U.S. mainland in 1976. By considering historic actors’ strategic framing of Reiki, this paper contributes to the understanding of changing attitudes towards the authority of ethnicity, religion and science across the Pacific.

Justin Stein is a doctoral student in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies.  His dissertation research, provisionally titled Alternate Currents: Healing with Energy Across the Pacific, studies the trans-Pacific cultural interactions involved in the production and circulation of Reiki, a set of spiritual healing practices.  For his M.A. in Religion (Asian) at the University of Hawai'i, Justin's thesis examined constructions of authority in successive narratives about Reiki's founder.  Justin also has a M.S. in Education from Brooklyn College and a B.A. in Philosophy from Hamilton College.

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Wednesday November 28, 2012, 4-6 pm
Room 208N

 

 

Zeinab McHeimech

Low Mutterings of Islamic Chants: Hearing Omar’s Islamic Inscriptions on the Black Atlantic

 

 

While African American studies has drawn connections between Christian spirituality and African American cultural production, such as in the work of W.E.B Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, and Paul Gilroy, few scholars have looked closely at the influence of Islam in constructing a black vernacular. Despite the erasure of West African Muslims from African American collective memory at the turn of the twentieth century, this essay considers, and seeks to reverse, the modalities of forgetting Islam by turning to Omar Ibn Said’s 1831 slave narrative. My analysis of Omar’s narrative builds upon recent work on Islam and the African diaspora by situating Omar’s strategic Islam within a larger critical conversation on African Islam in America, arguing that Omar’s Qur’anic recitations not only resist a Christian domination of black spirituality in the United States, but gesture toward and vocalize the gaps in our thinking of the Black Atlantic.

Zeinab McHeimech is a PhD candidate in English at Western University. Her current project Noting Knotted Notes: Memories of Enslaved Muslim Africans in American Literature seeks to supplement the field of African American studies by turning to the remnants of African Islam in a seemingly congealed, yet unstable, past as they manifest in American expressive culture and literature.

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Wednesday January 30, 2013, 4-6 pm
Room 208N

 

 

Laura J. Kwak

Asian-American Imperialism and the Crisis of Raciology

Two of the most scandalous American nationalist securitization measures in the last decade were architected by Asian Americans. Assistant Attorney General Viet D. Dinh was the chief architect of the US Patriot Act (2001) and Republican White House Attorney, John Yoo’s writings heavily shaped post-9/11 policies, including his “torture memos,” which illegally sanctioned the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (2002). However, these figures have not been examined by Asian American Studies. The existence of racial conservatives attests to the crisis of “race” and raciology (Gilroy 2000), and the need for politics without guarantee (Hall 1997). The figures examined are not only prominent Asian Americans holding positions of power and influence in the U.S., they are also conservative intellectuals, pundits, and elected politicians. While it appears that they have suddenly emerged onto the political scene, this paper investigates how since the late 1950s, conservative Asian leaders have played key roles in the United States.

Laura J. Kwak is a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation “Globalizing Racial Conservatism: The Making of Asian Conservative Political Figures” looks at the emergence of racial conservatism in Canada, the United States, and the UK, charting how Asian Canadian, American, and British political figures are embedded in shifting racial formations. She has recently won the Anita Affeldt Graduate Award from the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS), and holds an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS). She has presented her work in Canada, the US, and the UK. 

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Friday, February 1, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place

Theresa Runstedtler

Graduate Student Workshop
Fighting the Global Colour Line: Black Transnationalism in Unexpected Places

Co-sponsored by Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education, and Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies, OISE, University of Toronto

A former professional dancer/actress from Canada, Theresa Runstedtler chose to shift her passion for popular culture from the studio and stage to the classroom. She is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), and was recently a Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (2012), explores Johnson’s worldwide legacy as a black sporting hero and anticolonial icon in places as far-flung as Sydney, London, Cape Town, Manila, Paris, Havana, and Mexico City. Her scholarly articles appear in numerous publications including the Radical History Review (Winter 2009), and the Journal of World History (Dec. 2010).

 

This workshop is open to all University of Toronto Graduate students and Faculty members.

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Alexander Eastwood

Ordinary Endurance: the Aesthetics of Settling in Gertrude Stein’s "Three Lives"

     

This paper examines the problem of dwelling in the early work of Gertrude Stein in order to critique, more broadly, the reductive association of modernism with cosmopolitan mobility and transgression. The early twentieth century, a time of great epistemological and social upheaval, has typically been affiliated with negativity. Reading against this grain, I posit that the problem of domestic endurance in Three Lives is refracted through sexuality into tropes of wandering and settling Uniting recent queer work on affect and temporality with criticism on the ordinary, the paper reveals how Three Lives is at once invested in exposing the suffocating relationship of working-poor women to the domestic, and yet also in privileging domestic attachment as a valuable mode through which modern subjects bind themselves to the social. Ultimately, the paper identifies modernism’s vexed relationship to American culture’s preoccupation with novelty and self-invention, and the exhaustion and displacement these traditions can produce.

Alexander Eastwood is a Doctoral Candidate in English and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, from which he also holds an Honours B.A. in English. His dissertation, entitled “Strange Dwellings: Sex and Settling in Modern American Literature,” examines the concept of home in American modernism, and the import of somatic experience to the need for privacy and refuge within everyday modern life. He is a Junior Fellow of Massey College, and a Graduate Associate at the Centre for Ethics.

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Wednesday March 27, 2013, 4-6 pm
Room 208N

 

 

Brett Story

Hiding in Plain Sight: Spatial Practices of Penal Isolation in the Era of Mass Incarceration

In the U.S. today, more people are sentenced to more time in more prisons and in greater isolation than at any other time in its history. My project investigates how isolation operates within the organization and reproduction of the contemporary American prison system: how it is produced, what effects it has, and the primary arenas or means by which it is contested or undermined. Specifically, I examine penal isolation and its contradictions at four main sites located in the contemporary landscape of the New York State penal system: in the immediate, architectural space of solitary confinement within the prison itself; in the increasingly remote siting of prisons far from prisoner families and communities; from the densely penalized space of the urban “million-dollar block”; and in the spaces of circulation between and within urban and prison space which emerge or persist as social rebuttals to the organization of penal isolation.

Brett Story is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and Program in Planning. Her research focuses on the U.S. prison system, and the shifting relationship between urban and penal space. Brett has also worked extensively as an independent documentary filmmaker and freelance journalist, writing and producing video for publications such as The Nation, The Montreal Mirror, and the Toronto Review of Books. Her latest film, Land of Destiny, is a portrait of a petrochemical town in paralysis in the wake of an epidemic of cancers. 

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Wednesday April 24, 2013, 4-6 pm
Room 208N

 

 

David K. Seitz

Follow the Family?: The Cultural Politics of Neo-Liberalism in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin

 

 

After mass protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's union-busting measures garnered global attention in 2011, Walker cruised to a stunning recall election victory in 2012. Progressive-Left accounts of Walker's win have focused on the glut of outside corporate campaign donations in his coffers, and Democrats' failure to offer an alternative economic vision. While helpful, these "follow the money" explanations neglect neoliberalism's local inflections and cultural dimensions at their analytical and political peril. Instead of offering a causal explanation of Walker's victory, I explore mainstream labour activists' startling use of the trope of "working Wisconsin families" in pro-union appeals. Building on Wendy Brown's (2010) insight about neoliberalism not only as a mode of economic organization but a "way of making souls," I then point to local Left inflections of family and collectivity that might disturb, or even offer glimmers of alternatives, to neoliberalism's intimate incitements to make exclusive attestations of innocence.

David K. Seitz is a Ph.D. student in human geography at the University of Toronto, and participates in the collaborative programs in women and gender studies and sexual diversity studies. His dissertation research explores alternative urban, national and transnational geographies of belonging and critical political community at a predominantly LGBTQ Toronto church. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, David also has a longstanding research interest in the cultural politics of race, gender, sexuality and neoliberalism in the Midwestern U.S.

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SUMMER 2012

Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS) Graduate Student Workshop

 

The CSUS Graduate Student Workshop, initially launched in 2007-08, is designed for graduate students pursuing research relating to American society and culture broadly conceived. The workshop is a forum for graduate students to present work in progress before a group of peers, and may include dissertation proposals or chapters, articles, or conference papers. The workshop also provides a venue to showcase the emerging scholarship of the winners of the Graduate Research Grants in American Studies and/or the Study of the United States. The overall goal of the workshop is to receive friendly, but critical feedback from scholars coming from an array of disciplinary backgrounds.

 

The CSUS Graduate Student Workshop is a monthly, academic-year, daytime seminar presentation. Our aim is to include graduate students and interested faculty from many academic institutions in the surrounding area. Students at any area universities, or those dissertating in the GTA, are warmly welcomed to join the proceedings. Inclusion in the workshop is to be broadly defined; students working on transnational, hemispheric, or comparative projects are encouraged to participate. For the upcoming academic year, the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop will be held near the end of the month on Wednesdays, 4-6 pm, in the Munk School for Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. The Workshop is sponsored by the interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS).

 

We are currently seeking graduate students who would be interested in presenting their work in the 2012-13 academic year. Interested applicants should submit a paper title, brief abstract, one paragraph biography, and up-to-date C.V. The deadline for submissions is July 23th, 2012. If you are interested in presenting or serving as a commentator, please contact:

 

Benjamin Pottruff
Academic Advisor, American Studies Program
Doctoral Candidate, Department of History
University of Toronto
csus.advisor@utoronto.ca

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Fall 2011

Wednesday September 28, 2011, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk

 

Coffee Social

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Wednesday October 26, 2011, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk

 

Camille Bégin

“The Slap Slap Motion of the Tortilla”: Taste and Race in the American Southwest in the New Deal Era

 

This paper explores the food of the American Southwest in the 1930s, and uses the methodology of sensory history to analyze the ways in which race contributed to the taste of place in this modern American region. This sensory narrative draws on a close reading of the Federal Writers’ Project’s (FWP) popular guidebooks as well as the archive of the America Eats book project. The FWP participated in a process of sensory heritage-making that animated the region’s developing tourism industry. Mexican food was not only entrenched in a local creolized sensory identity, but also part of a tourist sensory economy that required and constructed an authentic perception of another race. Exploring the interplay of taste, place, race, and gender in the FWP’s archive allows a deeper and contextualized understanding of how the senses contribute to the making of race.

 

Camille Bégin is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on cultural history, sensory history, and material culture. Her dissertation is a study of the records of the Federal Writers’ Project, especially the America Eats book project.  Bégin’s article, “To partake of choice poultry cooked a la southern style: Taste and Race in the New Deal Sensory Economy,” is included in the Spring 2011 issue of the Radical History Review entitled “Radical Food.” Before relocating to Toronto, Begin earned her MA from the University Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne’s Centre de Recherche d`Histoire Nord Américaine.  

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Wednesday November 30, 2011, 4-6 pM
Room 208N, Munk

 

Elizabeth Jewett

Playing with Nature: Exploring the History of Golf Course Construction in North America, 1873-1945

 

Between 1873 and 1945, golf grew from a recreational activity for the wealthy to a popular sporting interest amongst the upper-middle and some members of the working class in North America. As the sport spread across the continent, class, culture, and the physical environment interacted when it came to imagining and building new “golfscapes.” Jewett’s paper explores how these new golfing landscapes were a product of the architects, greens keepers, and golfers’ shifting notions of what made a first-class golf course, as transnational design ideals and technological innovations intersected with the local, social, and environmental realities. Through the examples of the transatlantic circulation of golf architecture principles, and the establishment of the Green Section of the United States Golf Association, she illustrates how designing and building “golfscapes” in North America helped to create a new type of human/nature interaction, which blended together pre-existing ways to conceptualize, shape, and experience the natural world.

 

Elizabeth Jewett is finishing the fourth year of her PhD program in the History Department at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, titled: “Behind the Greens: Understanding Golfing Landscapes in Canada, 1873-1945,” explores the environmental history of golfing landscapes in North America. Her research highlights the centrality of intersecting transatlantic cultural ideas about nature, sport, and class with local physical environments in crafting and defining these unique spaces. Jewett is an administrator and participant in several academic environmental history organizations including: Quelques Arpents de Neiges, and the Network in Canadian History and the Environment (NiCHE).

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Wednesday January 25, 2012, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk

 

Rebecca O’Neill

The Promise of School Lunch: Professional Discourses of Nutrition Education and Civilization in Post-War North America

 

This paper examines the discourse that emerged about school lunch programs in the United States and Canada among school lunch professionals following the Second World War.  While improved physical health was one factor behind lunch programs, this paper examines the ways in which these programs came to represent what I refer to as the “utopian lunch.” This model saw school lunch as a tool for the promotion of nutrition education, the development of social skills, the inculcation of civic consciousness and democratic ideals, and the assurance of increased “civilized” behaviour and thought among school-children.  These discussions are explained in terms of cold war anxiety, the need to provide new justifications for school feeding programs, and the push for professional legitimacy. The paper uses school lunches as a lens to explore the ways in which ideas about national security, social betterment, and civilization are linked to food choice and eating habits.

 

O’Neill is a fifth year direct-admit doctoral candidate.  Rebecca’s dissertation is entitled “Food for Thinking: School Lunch and the Cultural Construction of ‘Brain Food’ for Children in New York City and Toronto, 1940 – 1980.” Her research deals with food history in twentieth century North America. Specifically, she studies school lunches in Toronto and New York City between 1940 and 1980.  Her work explores the social, cultural, and economic factors that contributed to nutritional understandings and food choices within families and schools throughout the twentieth century.  O’Neill is a 2011-2012 Lupina/OGS Doctoral Fellow with the Munk School of Global Affairs’ Comparative Program on Health and Society.  O’Neill holds two prior degrees from Queen’s University:  she graduated with distinction from her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in 2006 and from her Bachelor of Education (Concurrent) in 2007.

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Wednesday February 29, 2012, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk

 

Ian Rocksborough-Smith

Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History in the Black Power Era: The Washington Park Relocation

 

In the late 1960s, Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History began a negotiation with city officials to relocate into a larger facility in Washington Park, next to the University of Chicago. Through this relocation, the museum helped to re-envision an African-American “social space” into the city’s south side geography, a process that mirrored the diverse engagements of Black Power activists around the country with civic-level politics. Since its founding in 1961, and especially by the end of that decade, the museum’s many functions included tour groups, curatorial exhibitions from around the world, archival research, and popular educational functions such as regular Black history classes and lectures—all of which required an increasingly larger space to operate. The ensuing initiative to seek relocation demonstrated how battles over the parameters of African-American cultural politics during the Black Power era could usefully be considered through the evolution of public history practices.

 

Ian Rocksborough-Smith is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He is working on a dissertation about post-World War II African-American and labor-left cultural politics in Cold War Chicago.  His fields of interest include late nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. social and cultural history, and histories of race in the Americas. In 2009-2010, he held a Fulbright student award, and was a visiting graduate scholar with Northwestern University’s Department of African American Studies.

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Wednesday March 28, 2012, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk

 

Joshua Akers

The Annihilation of Space by Just in Time Delivery

This paper argues that an impoverished theory of decline contributes to the narrative of a disembodied and exceptional space of the other that has emerged around Detroit in particular, and declining cities more broadly. Focusing on Detroit, it examines spaces of decline through a comparative analysis of representations of the Michigan Central Station and the grounded political economy of the station and surrounding area as a site of struggle for control in global shipping networks. The active erasure of the city’s population, particularly in the global circulation of photographs, has extended the trope of the disappearing city, and perpetuated a frontier imaginary of blank slates and boundless possibilities. The emptiness of these photographs captures the dissonance of an impoverished theory of decline predominantly focused on absence and loss. It obscures actors engaged in systemic exploitation in dismantling the city to manage the flows of profit through and out of Detroit.

 

Joshua Akers is a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Toronto. His current project Rethinking Decline examines the role of capital in community in reshaping spaces of decline. The work is funded in part through a Centre for the Study of the United States Graduate Research Grant.

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Wednesday April 25, 2012, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk

 

Patrick Vitale

Red Scares and Renewal

 

In this paper, Vitale reviews Pittsburgh’s role as what David Caute described as the “violent epicenter of the anti-Communist eruption.” He spans a series of events from the formation of the local organization Americans Battling Communism (ABC) and its 1948 attack on a Communist Party meeting on Pittsburgh’s North Side, to the 1949 purge of the radical United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) from the CIO, to the early 1950s trials and imprisonment of Communist Party organizer Steve Nelson. Rather than rewrite the well-documented history of red scares in Pittsburgh, he offers a new interpretation. Red scares were part of an intentional campaign that used a spectrum of violence (from mobs to courts) to limit the possibility of left and progressive politics in Pittsburgh. Red scares were part of the overall effort by business conservatives to remake the Pittsburgh region (and the United States) as a place safe for capitalism. 

 

Patrick Vitale is a doctoral student in geography working on a dissertation, “Nuclear Suburbs: Westinghouse and the everyday politics of the Cold War in suburban Pittsburgh.” Patrick’s research examines the confluence of the Cold War, nuclear science, and suburbanization in the Pittsburgh region from 1937 to 1979. Using the Westinghouse Electric Corporation's extensive involvement in the nuclear industry as an example, Patrick argues that the suburbanization of scientific work was a vital and overlooked aspect of the dramatic remaking of the Pittsburgh region during the Cold War. Fundamental to Patrick’s argument is that the Cold War is constituted at the level of the local and everyday, that Cold War science is situated within a suburban context, and that one force driving suburbanization in Pittsburgh was the desire to protect the privilege of scientific research and researchers.